Hi. We’re in progress of moving a big community on Discourse from vb3. Many usernames - around 1.200 - do contain the exclamation mark “!” and I couldn’t find any option to re-enable it. We already enabled “unicode usernames” to no avail. Is there any ready solution for this issue? Thank you!

Wow, seems like quite the oversight…is any technical explanation for this? Our would we be able to sort this with a plugin or a fork?

I didn’t make the decision, but there are plenty of systems for which a ! isn’t a valid character for a username. It’s a good bet that if you did try to allow it in a plugin (or a fork, which would be a very, very bad idea if you ever want to upgrade Discourse again), it will be hard. The ! has special meanings in a bunch of contexts and I suspect that if you just change the username validator a bunch of other stuff will break.

I understand. It’s something that should be addressed though. All other BB solutions allow that char in the username and it’s common in gaming communities. Username and user ID should be kept as separate entities as not to have such limitations. We have around 95.000 members and contacting 1.200 of them to change their username is going to be a real PITA. Thanks for the help anyway!

I’ve done dozens, maybe over a hundred imports. I pay close attention to people asking about imports here. This is the first time I remember anyone complaining about it. [image] AV C: contacting 1.200 of them to change their username is going to be a real PITA. You can tell everyone to try both their username and their email address (a bunch of them won’t know that either). It is a good bet that you have some other usernames that changed. This will give you all of the usernames that changed: UserCustomField.where(name: 'import_username').pluck(:value)

[image] Jay Pfaffman: This is the first time I remember anyone complaining about it. I found a couple of topics: https://meta.discourse.org/t/username-restrictions/126664 [image] What are the Discourse rules for usernames? Support Hello, please can someone point me in the direction of the rules for usernames? I’m trying to establish if ampersands and apostrophes are allowed or not but I cannot find anything in here that helps me. Many thanks. It’s probably going to be alot more than just exclamation marks. Seems such a strange limitation, since you can use those characters anywhere else. Anyway, thank you for your help.

It’s worth pointing out that names and usernames aren’t the same thing. Usernames are used in URL paths, for example: https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman/summary An exclamation mark isn’t a valid character in a URL, while characters such as ? & have special purposes in URL structure and therefore also can’t be part of a username. This isn’t specific to Discourse, any system which uses the username in the URL structure has to respect this. A username can’t contain an exclamation mark, but the name can, which you can prioritize in the UI.

makes perfect sense @Stephen, thanks for clarifying. I think we could just alter the import script to do something like: username_original = username username = @htmlentities.decode(user["username"]).strip { id: user["userid"], name: username_original, username: username, password: password, [...] And in the discourse setting enable the priority for the user “name”, if it’s present, over the username.

[image] Stephen: It’s worth pointing out that names and usernames aren’t the same thing. Usernames are used in URL paths In addition to this, usernames are meant to be used in @mentions, and so the expectation is that usernames will be straightfoward and easy to type; that’s why we only allow ASCII characters by default (though that can be expanded to unicode by the unicode_usernames setting, though still no punctuation). [image] Crius: I think we could just alter the import script to do something like Note that that migration script uses the non bulk migration script base class, which does this with each user record generated by the method you linked: script/import_scripts/base.rb main location = opts.delete(:location) avatar_url = opts.delete(:avatar_url) original_username = opts[:username] original_name = opts[:name] original_email = opts[:email] = opts[:email].downcase if !UsernameValidator.new(opts[:username]).valid_format? || !User.username_available?(opts[:username]) opts[:username] = UserNameSuggester.suggest( opts[:username].presence || opts[:name].presence || opts[:email], ) end if !EmailAddressValidator.valid_value?(opts[:email]) opts[:email] = fake_email puts "Invalid email '#{original_email}' for '#{opts[:username]}'. Using '#{opts[:email]}'" end opts[:name] = original_username if original_name.blank? && opts[:username] != original_username which strips any invalid characters from usernames. There are many places in the code that assume certain things about usernames (@mention parsing, changing usernames, etc), which is the reason why we enforce these restrictions. Like Stephen says, usernames are not the place to show user personality; the name and flair fields are :slight_smile:

[image] Leonardo Mosquera: Like Stephen says, usernames are not the place to show user personality; the name and flair fields are There’s still quite a few fringe cases that are difficult to manage with it being this way. Names are non-unique, if we give priority in the layout to the name you can imagine how that would go in a message board full of immature teenagers that game and troll all day :slight_smile: It’s perfectly fine to say that it might be a low priority issue, still it’s something that could clearly use some thought and work and for sure not a “feature” or something that gives an advantage over being able to choose an unique name without strong limits like any other bb software that’s been around.

Exclamation mark and special characters in usernames

Product Support Migration

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) December 2, 2022, 4:52pm 2

No. Changing legal characters in usernames is not really an option. I think they’ll have to have less exciting usernames.

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Exclamation mark and special characters in usernames

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